3D Print Your Future

Image Source: Wired.

3D printing is about to become very big indeed. Yesterday's post covered a report on 3D printed food. Above, a CT scan of an anesthetized rat was sent to a 3D printer to produce a three-dimensional skeleton, with obvious wide applications in medicine and education.

Video Source: Youtube.

Also revolutionary is the new science of printing living organs. Imagine the implications for health and anti-ageing. Again, from Wired, Gabor Forgacs of the University of Missouri-Columbia recently printed beating chicken heart cells:

A Missouri professor took several types of chicken heart cells and 3D printed them into large sheets with cell-friendly gel. The cells took over from there, sorting themselves into working order. Then they began beating, just as a heart would.

Presented in an upcoming issue of Tissue Engineering, lead author, Gabor Forgacs says his new research “shows that we can use multiple cell types and that we do not have to control what happens when the cells fuse together. Nature is smart enough to do the job.” The cells, by being set into a given structure, know what to do and where they should go. Still, researchers are many years away from actually being able to print organs on-demand.

Then there was the disturbing report from Vice last month about 3D printed guns, initiated by Generation Y University of Texas law school student Cody R. Wilson, and Philosophy and PoliSci University of Central Arkansas graduate (2004) Ben Denio - also a Millennial. Together, they founded Defense Distributed and plan to leapfrog over their conventional career paths by becoming arms dealers. They have open sourced and strive to continue to open source their program for 3D printed guns in a so-called Wiki Weapons project; this is their vision of public service: freedom of speech and freedom of self-defense against Big Government and Big Banks.

They take Facebook as an example for their business development, given that Facebook was able to exploit all kinds of loopholes in outdated privacy laws for about a six-year period before the system started to respond to their appropriation and sale of personal information. In a similar way, these Millennials expect they can get away with a lot while the system slowly reacts to their plans. Wiki:

In May 2013, it was reported that Wilson was successful in manufacturing and conducting a test firing of a gun made by use of a 3D printer bought on eBay. After test firing in May, Wilson also released blueprints of the design on the internet. ... Wilson has been named one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world by Wired magazine.

See the Vice report below. Note how Wilson justifies his program, based on his belief in the collapse and meaningless of conflictual Millennial politics. While this is a more or less accurate assessment of what has happened to domestic and international affairs post-9/11 (at least on the surface), Wilson and his colleagues appear to have responded by becoming standard issue Young Man Ayn Randers. They believe that the establishment is gone and are operating beyond it with their uniquely self-empowered and self-appointed agenda; from the Vice report: "the reality is that [Wilson] could be the canary in the coal mine that is showing us what the future may be."

Welcome to the post-recession worldview of today's Bright Young Things. These Millennials both live up to, and obliterate, the facile generalizations made about them. This Anonymous generation is far more savvy than the coddled children depicted in MSM reports. Will they change the world? Yes. Will they save us? No, because their vision of saving society begins with the presumption that it is already gone. There is a streak of superficial arrogant narcissism here, masquerading as freedom-loving, libertarian individualism. And, as the Vice report observes, it is clear that Cody Wilson loves the attention.

"Click, Print, Gun." Video Source: Vice via Youtube.